The Cat Came Back
by MissAnnThropic
Summary: It had to be wrong how much easier it was to sleep like this, with Alec at her back. Sequel to 'Genetically Engineered Stray'
1. Chapter 1

Title: The Cat Came Back

Author: MissAnnThropic

Spoilers: Sequel to "Genetically Engineered Stray"

LiveJournal: miss_annthropic(dot)livejournal(dot)com  
This fic is already posted in its entirety on my LJ. I am really trying to make that my primary locale online. It's been tough - old dog, new tricks, and all that.

Summary: It had to be wrong how much easier it was to sleep like this, with Alec at her back.

Disclaimer: None of it's mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(

Author's Note: This is all for you guys! I hadn't planned on doing anything more with the Genetically Engineered Stray storyline, but your feedback was so succulent and thoughtful that I just felt like I owed you a bit more.

* * *

Max was an insanely light sleeper, thanks to genetic engineering and training on the part of Manticore, which was the only reason she heard the faint sounds of an expert intruder sneaking into her and Cindy's apartment in the dead of night.

Eyes snapping open, she lay perfectly still and listened to the sounds out in the living room and kitchen. It wasn't Cindy's current and semi-serious girlfriend creeping in for a roll in the sheets. Those visits were common enough and were never so deft and silent.

Whoever had just broken into their place was a pro.

Without so much as the sigh of sheets to betray her movement, Max slipped out of bed and crouched in the darkness of her bedroom. Her pupils dilated, swallowed the smallest hint of light, and adjusted with cat-like acuity until the inky blackness was a play of grays.

A footfall coming closer to her bedroom prompted Max into action.

Max slunk toward her bedroom door, body on a hair trigger and senses at their peak. She was all the feline that Manticore had bred into her as she stalked her would be attacker.

Manticore was her first guess. Who else would have the kind of training and stealth this douche did? She wasn't sure how Lydecker had tracked her down, but she wasn't about to go back to Manticore without breaking a few necks along the way.

She was hunkered in a preparatory position next to her doorframe as the door slowly swung inward.

A dark figure, more of a hulking shadow in the blackness of night, slipped into her bedroom.

Max lashed out.

If the intruder had been anyone else, she would have broken bones and dropped the guy without even breaking a sweat. But this guy wasn't an ordinary cat burglar looking for a decent vase to snatch, and he reacted to her strike with deadly speed.

He avoided her punch, rushed her, hooked a foot behind her Achilles tendons, and the confines of her bedroom worked against her and Max fell back onto her bed. She tensed to leap up and fight…

… when the intruder spoke.

"Is that how you welcome all your houseguests, Max?"

Max froze and blinked up at the dark shape, bewildered but quickly growing indignant. "_Alec_?!"

"You know, you almost clocked me," he said in a low, untroubled voice. "You must be kind of rusty."

Max could _hear_ the condescending smirk on his face.

She pushed herself out of bed and whirled to face him in the pitch darkness. "What the _hell_ are you doing breaking into my apartment in the middle of the night? And for that matter, what makes you think you're a _houseguest_? Houseguests are _invited_."

Alec chuckled and moved. He turned away from her, eased the bedroom door shut, then turned on the light.

Max flinched as the light assailed her cat-enhanced night vision and she could see that Alec was recoiling from the brightness, too. The lighting in her room was pretty piss-poor, but to a transgenic it could be a startling contrast.

When her vision adjusted, Max took a quick look at him. The last time she'd seen him was the night before last, when she'd dragged him in off the streets looking like something the cat dragged in, played with, killed, then played with some more for good measure. He'd been running on fumes, sleep-deprived and lost in the world outside Manticore. She'd felt sorry for him and brought him home. She let him sleep in her bed.

Now she was worried that her moment of weakness/kindness had come back to bite her on the ass.

Alec gave her a lop-sided smile. "I'm hurt, Max… I really am. Here I thought you'd be glad to see me."

"And _why_ would I be glad to see you?"

Alec shrugged nonchalantly, but Max noted a faint edginess to his body lines. He looked tense. Keyed up. _Nervous_. She was trained to read a fellow soldier like a brother, to know what intel his body language gave her when speech might not avail her.

She was slightly uncomfortable when the look Alec pinned her with suggested he could read her lines just as well. "Felt kind of bad for you, that's all. You know… stuck with the normals for company all the time… thought you might like some transgenic company. You remember them, right? Your own kind." He winked at her.

Sometimes it was all she wanted but would never confess that, and least of all to smart-mouth Alec.

"And this occurred to you in the middle of the night?" she snarled. She didn't get much sleep, but the sleep she _did_ get she cherished.

Alec began to move around her room. Not really strolling… more of a sweeping, assessing walk of the perimeter. He was pacing off the distance from the bed to the door, the far wall to the window… Max knew because she saw it in the cut of his eyes, the press of his lips.

She should _not_ understand his body language so well.

She hated that it was comfortable and familiar and so much easier to understand than the flamboyant gestures of Cindy or the tight, repressed movements of Logan. Their body language screeched nonsense, as if _they_ didn't even know who or what they were. Alec's body language made sense to her.

Alec said all that he was in his walk and did not make excuses for it.

He was the same as her in that regard.

"Don't you get tired of playing weak for them?" Alec asked lowly, and a great deal of the teasing had left his voice for half a second.

Max stepped back… angry because he had hit the mark. "You bust into my place in the middle of the night for a philosophy talk?"

He shrugged.

Max rolled her eyes. "Well, no thanks for stopping by, now get out so I can go back to sleep."

At that, Alec paused with his back to her. Then he deliberately turned to face her. All the jocularity had vanished from his expression. "You know… the shakes…"

Max stilled. She remembered the morning he'd been in her apartment, when she dragged him out of her shower, shaking from a seizure much like the ones she suffered.

Alec stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets. The same jacket (and looking the worse for wear) that he'd been wearing two days ago. "When we were young, the others in my unit and I… we worked out how to keep them to a minimum." Alec looked up at her. "It's all in the serotonin levels."

"Wow, give the boy the science fair ribbon," Max said drolly. "The serotonin thing's not news."

Alec favored her with a fleeting, tight, and especially _annoyed_, smile. "No… but we found out that our own bodies were making the shakes worse. You know us, Max… we can go days on end, tirelessly. Two to three hours of sleep and we're still at the top of our game. We don't _need_ much sleep, not like normals do. Manticore taught us if we don't need it, don't take it. Sleep was just another enemy. But if we _make_ ourselves sleep…" Alec glanced at a stack of music on her dresser, just to break the moment of remembering too much too clearly. "It must be the cat in us… we don't _like _sleeping during the night. But my unit figured out that even if we don't _want_ to sleep, we can _make_ ourselves do it." Alec looked back at her and his expression was absolutely serious. "We have to get closer to five hours a night than three. As long as we do, the shakes go away. Only become a problem again when we let ourselves lose too much sleep."

Alec's eyes flitted, once, to Max's bed.

His slightly less belligerent body posture told her the rest.

Max sighed. "You didn't sleep at all last night, did you?"

Alec made a 'nah' face that was far too casual for the sincerity in his shoulders and the heavy droop of his hands in his jacket pockets.

"Kind of a rough neighborhood for catching z's," Alec joked lamely.

Max remembered well the sleepless nights when she had been alone. She wondered what it would have been like if she'd known where to go to find another transgenic, even if it had been someone like Alec. She would have gone to him. As much as he annoyed her, when she was alone in a mad world, she would have been desperate for another transgenic's presence.

"You should try to find a place of your own," Max said wearily. Even she could hear how less hostile her tone was. She couldn't be mad at him for feeling vulnerable… to a soldier, it was the worst feeling in the world.

"Hey, yeah… and I could get my very own version of O.C., and we could have slumber parties and do each others' hair," Alec taunted in false falsetto, batting his eyelashes theatrically.

"You got a really shitty way of asking for a favor, pal," Max snapped.

Alec went deadly seriously in a second flat and he pinned her with a very penetrating, knowing look. "You hate sleeping surrounded by civilians just as much as I do."

Max hated him for being right. She hated him for knowing it. She was used to Cindy's nocturnal sounds and movements (the blind shuffle for a glass of water, the giggle of two women tangled in love), but she didn't feel _safe_ having Cindy there. If there was an attack, Cindy was a liability, plain and simple.

Max had no back up.

Max got used to always sleeping slightly on edge. She thought she masked her constant awareness well, so well no one would ever guess she was tense even in sleep. She hated that Alec striped that veneer away from her so easily.

"Five hours, huh?" she asked.

Alec assessed her mood, took it for the peace treaty that it was, and nodded. "Yeah. Who'd have thought, right? When my unit figured out the magic number – we couldn't have been but about eleven – we started covering for each other, tricking our instructors on field exercises, lying about who was pulling sentry duty when, so everyone got a chance for a little more sleep. Cut our losses in half from having bunkmates dragged off shaking."

Max moved a few paces closer to her bed and turned to idly study the rumpled sheets as she turned over Alec's words. Manipulating the instructors, lying to them, misleading them, all for the sake of one another. It sounded like something her unit would have done. Her brothers and sisters, looking out for each other. "Your unit covered for each other like that?"

Alec's voice hardened. "You think your unit was so special? That you were kids but the rest of us were monsters?"

Max turned quickly to look at him, but in that second he realized he'd let slip too much and shut down the instant she set eyes on him. If he hadn't been on day two without sleep, it probably would not have slipped out at all.

It made her curious as hell… what was life at Manticore like for Alec? She'd always assumed he was the picture that she kept in her mind of the perfect solider. Mindless, obedient, trained to a fault to kill without compunction or conscience. She'd never thought of how he might have been like _her_.

With a rush of sadness, she suddenly imagined a young Alec as Ben had been. Warm. Social. Comforting. Someone she loved.

Then Max remembered the feel of Ben's neck breaking in her hand and averted her eyes from the memory of his face in Alec's.

Max looked toward the closed bedroom door for a moment then look back at Alec. "Well?" she said impatiently.

Alec's eyebrows rose in question.

"I'd only been asleep about an hour before you busted in here," Max griped, "so I've still got four to make up before daylight. Wasting night here."

Alec almost smiled at her, almost softly, then the devil-may-care was back and he shucked his shoes and jacket.

Max glanced down at her own attire – panties and a ratty old shirt – and she said, "Keep your underwear on."

Alec, standing in her room shirtless and working on his fly, looked up at her quizzically.

Awkwardly, Max nodded faintly toward the bedroom door and by extension Cindy beyond it.

Alec followed her gaze, understood, and nodded.

Max crawled back into bed and curled up on her side, taking up exactly half the mattress. Alec turned off the lights and crawled into the empty space beside her, his back brushing against hers. Just like the first night Max found Alec on the streets and brought him home.

Max sat up, dragged up the covers from their balled position at the foot of the bed, and tossed them over both her and Alec. With a minimal of shifting and settling, they were both stone-still and dropping off into sleep.

Max closed her eyes and frowned to herself. It had to be wrong how much easier it was to sleep like this, with Alec at her back. She didn't even like him, not really, but at night his presence was damnably comforting. It was just like before, when Alec had shared her bed. A sense of security, a feeling she never found outside her old unit in Manticore, overtook her slowly. It was a feeling of safety she had never felt alone before.

She couldn't help her upbringing. She'd been raised a pack animal, and the comfort of a fellow wolf beside her was unrivaled for easing her back into slumber.

Alec's breathing had shifted into deep sleep already and Max soon followed suit.

To Be Continued…


	2. Chapter 2

Max knew Dreamy (no way in hell that was her real name), Cindy's latest and greatest squeeze. She'd met her at Crash the other night, and once Cindy had brought her back to the apartment for 'luscious girls' night in', so that was obviously how Dreamy knew how to find the apartment.

Max registered the sound of the front door opening at god-awful o'clock a.m. She recognized the jingle of Dreamy's characteristic jewelry from the depths of sleep and did not move herself to get out of bed for it. Cindy could handle her honey.

From the misstep and snort beyond the bedroom door, Max suspected Dreamy had been drinking. She probably hadn't been to bed yet at all. Dreamy had a night job at the market and dragged in when most people were still asleep. Sometimes Cindy got up early to meet her somewhere at the end of Dreamy's shift. Sometimes, Dreamy came prowling around for some petting at indecently early hours.

It was yet another (one of many) irritants that Max had to suffer in the world of chaos beyond Manticore's universe of order.

Cindy had apologized for her girl's hours, but Max played it off. She didn't tell Cindy just how aware she was of Dreamy's comings and goings, even when the woman was making a good effort at being quiet. Max was just too keenly aware of her surroundings not to notice. Telling Cindy as much would only highlight what a freak of nature Max was, so she let it go.

Max realized their second late-night arrival in one night was only Cindy's girlfriend, and she stayed resolutely in bed, intent on ignoring it as best she could and going back to sleep immediately.

Alec stirred beside her. He had no doubt heard Dreamy, too.

Max knew she should explain the situation to Alec, but the pull of sleep still had her in its clutches. She was so very reluctant to rouse herself for any reason less dire than an actual Manticore break-in. Max knew from experience that once she was up it would be nearly impossible to fall back to sleep again.

She lay quietly and listened… about all the action she was inclined to take on the matter of Cindy's latest girlfriend. If there was an actual danger she'd be up and alert in a second, but Dreamy was far from dangerous and Max didn't allot her the due of a danger.

By the sound of her footsteps, Dreamy shuffled in the living room a moment, paused, then stumbled toward Max's room. The girl was really drunk tonight. Max was bemoaning that she would have to shoo Dreamy in the direction of the right bedroom and interrupt her precious sleep to do it.

Alec silently sat up and Max could feel the tension in his body as he listened to the encroaching intruder.

Max really ought to wake up and explain the Dreamy situation to him, but the pillow was _so_ comfortable and she _so_ badly didn't want to ruin a night's sleep over Dreamy.

Dreamy was at Max's bedroom door.

Alec's weight on the mattress shifted, his hip came up against the small of Max's back, and Max felt the heat of his body as he braced one arm on the other side of her, almost touching her stomach.

He was going to defend her against this new enemy. He was being exactly what she had needed him to be when he came to her bed - a fellow soldier watching her back.

The bedroom door creaked open.

Alec's muscles tightened with the readiness to lunge.

Max blindly reached out and brought her hand to rest on Alec's arm, stilling him seconds before he attacked.

Alec hesitated at her touch and Dreamy poked her head in, saw Max and Alec in bed, and immediately giggled. "Oh! S'ry, Max! Wong woom." Dreamy snorted. "I said woom."

Max could feel Alec's eyes on her and she dropped her hand. "Try the door across the living room, Dreamy," Max mumbled.

Dreamy giggled and closed the door.

Alec noticeably relaxed.

Max snuggled back down into the covers and her crumpled pillow, though the hold of slumber on her was shaken.

Alec was still taut, she could sense his energy. "_Dreamy_?" Alec sneered, voice with an edge of steel.

Max grunted. "Someone who used to answer to a number shouldn't make fun of other's names." Having been forced to talk to both Dreamy and Alec, Max felt the sweet grip of sleep fading. She scowled but relented to her nature. It was nice while it lasted, anyway.

Resigned to being up for the day, Max pushed herself up to her elbows on the bed.

Immediately, Alec closed his hand around her arm. Not hard… only enough to make his point.

Max threw a dark look over her shoulder at him.

Alec flopped back down on his side, this time accommodating for the twist he'd made to cover Max and lying facing toward the center of the bed. He tucked his arms across his chest and chided, "Five hours, Max."

"But I'm up now," Max complained.

"Yeah, I know, and you're good to go. Lie down."

Max narrowed her eyes at him sourly. Did he really think sleep was as easy as that? She'd lived all her life with insanely chronic insomnia, all thanks to Manticore and the DNA of a nocturnal hunter mixed into her genes.

Apparently Alec _did_ think it was that easy, because he closed his eyes like he had every intention of falling back asleep.

Irked but willing to try (for the satisfaction of saying 'I told you so' when it didn't work), Max lay back down on the bed on her side. There were but an inch of space between her body and Alec's. His contours matched hers, traced her lines, but did not deign to actually touch her. They weren't _snuggling_. His limbs didn't ensnare her or hinder her range of motion, should she need to move fast.

It was just enough for her to be very aware that he was with her without the unpleasantness of limbs akimbo, sprawling over her.

Max could feel the brush of Alec's breath against the back of her neck and focused far too intently on it. Its regularity, its rhythm, its warm touch.

She was shocked when she felt herself nodding off, but she wasn't so intent on proving Alec wrong that she fought sleep's pull.

* * *

The next time Max woke up, she was alone. It troubled her how stealthy Alec could be when he wanted to. To know that if he had half a mind, he could slip past her unnoticed.

As she got up and dressed, she realized she would not be so opposed to him sneaking past her defenses in the night again if he wanted to.

END


End file.
